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This week: We talk to Maud Lavin about her most recent book and more!

Lifted from elsewhere:

In the past, more often than not, aggressive women have been rebuked, told to keep a lid on, turn the other cheek, get over it. Repression more than aggression was seen as womanâ€™s domain. But recently thereâ€™s been a noticeable cultural shift. With growing frequency, womenâ€™s aggression is now celebrated in contemporary cultureâ€”in movies and TV, online ventures, and art. InÂ Push Comes to Shove, Maud Lavin examines these new images of aggressive women and how they affect womenâ€™s lives.

Aggression, says Lavin, is necessary, large, messy, psychological, and physical. Aggression need not entail causing harm to another; we can think of it as the use of force to create changeâ€”fruitful, destructive, or both. And over the past twenty years, contemporary culture has shown women seizing this power. Lavin chooses provocative examples to explore the complexity of aggression: the surfer girls inÂ Blue Crush; Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison inÂ Prime Suspect; the homicidal women inÂ Kill BillÂ and artist Marlene McCartyâ€™s mural-sizedÂ Murder Girls; the erotica of Zane and the art of Kara Walker; the group dynamics of artists (including the artists group Toxic Titties) and activists; and YouTube videos of a woman boxer training and fighting.

Women need aggression and need to use it consciously, Lavin writes. WithÂ Push Comes to Shove, she explores the crucial questions of how to manifest aggression, how to represent it, and how to keep open a cultural space for it.